The acceptance of wireless devices as a preferred personal communications medium has created a growing demand for such devices. Users of such devices also increasingly expect more functionality and a broader range of services to be made available through such devices. Not only is there a demand for more functionality, there is also a demand for faster response times and more efficient access to remote services.
A major challenge is faced in exposing wireless devices to complex data sources, such as web services, due to the size and complexity of the data structures communicated from such sources. In wired networks and devices where resources and efficiency are not a significant concern, it is permissible to transmit, process and store large and complex data structures.
Complex data structures containing many objects and levels of nesting introduce a significant memory overhead on wireless devices. This impacts performance when storing to and retrieving from a memory store.
Consequently, what is desired is a method and apparatus to efficiently encode complex data structures of an application definition.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.